President Donald Trump said Thursday that he had little interest in opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling until a friend “who’s in that world and in that business” called and told him Republicans have been trying to do so for decades.

It was at that moment, it seems, that it became a competition.

“After that I said, ‘Oh, make sure that’s in the [tax] bill,’” Trump said during a speech at the GOP congressional retreat in West Virginia.

“I really didn’t care about it,” he added. “And then when I heard that everybody wanted it — for 40 years they’ve been trying to get it approved — I said, ‘Make sure you don’t lose ANWR.’”

Trump didn’t say who first urged him to push for opening the refuge’s 1.5 million-acre coastal plain, also known as the 1002 Area.